Qasem Soleimani's death is certain to escalate tensions between the US & Iran. Iran hardliners and neo-cons are celebrating, no doubt - they've been lusting for confrontation with Tehran and have just upped the ante. But you know who else is celebrating? Iraqis and Syrians.
Soleimani directed the murderous crackdown against Iraqi protesters and oversaw a genocide in Syria. He was the face of an expansionary sectarian project that pitted people against each other by fostering loyalists that would kill their own people, as Tehran carved up the region.
He was indispensable for his ability to keep Tehran's proxies united, and it has no operative to fill that role now. In Syria it might spell the end of Iran's goal to apply it's Iraqi blueprint of militias and loyalists, as it consolidates in Iraq & Lebanon in the midst of unrest
Trump promised a response to the U.S. embassy storming in Baghdad and did. Iran had gotten cozy with having free reign to act with impunity in the region as U.S. policy under both Trump & Obama administrations had coalesced around anti-ISIS coalition ops since 2014.
But now, it appears Tehran overplayed its hand and it backfired spectacularly. The symbolic face for their imperial regional project has been culled.
Consequences of Soleimani's death likely plays out in an escalatory spiral between Tehran & Washington. Iraqis will suffer further as a result. For all the fears of Trump's FP belligerence, it took him 3 years to carry out such an inflammatory decision.
Desperate to distract from impeachment proceedings, Trump ordered the extrajudicial killing of another state's military leader that the US state isn't officially at war with. The region is a tinderbox; such a decision could eventually precipitate even more sanguinary blowback.
While war with Iran would undoubtedly be catastrophic, and anti-war cries are right to be amplified after a stunning escalation by the US, it is something else to whitewash Soleimani and the scale to which he has the region's blood on his hands.
Soleimani pursued a strategy of ethnic cleansing & sectarianization & assaulted the sovereignty of Arab states. In this context, the victim is not an actor devoid of moral agency & responsibility that leads to binary thinking solely confined to a reckless geopolitical act.
One's internationalism rings hollow if we cannot understand the impact that Soleimani's blood-letting had in the region and what he represented: conquest and repression.
Being anti-war is one thing, but indifference to the suffering of millions, because they are more convenient as geopolitical chess pieces, is not internationalism with any sense of solidarity - it is reactionary isolationism masquerading as anti-war posturing.
The vicious mastermind behind Iran's regional project is dead, and for that we should say good riddance. That doesn't mean we can't equally reject contesting imperialisms and mobilization of the American war machine.
Oppression and imperialism carried out by competing actors are all the same to those who suffer the most from it. The world is complex and nuanced, and our understanding of it should, likewise, be informed by complexity and nuance.
And above all, our solidarity should be with those who continue to struggle for freedom and dignity in the face of their wretched oppressors of various hues, from the Andes to the Levant.
#Soleimani #Iran #Trump #WWIII
#Soleimani #Iran #Trump #WWIII
